Merlin Mann:

You’re absolutely right. You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die. And nobody’s gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I’m not even talking about legacy; I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something, and I feel least alive when I’m being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn’t aware of. To me, that’s the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner’s World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you’re just a fat man.

There’s no amount of information that’s going to take the place of putting on the shoes and starting to move a little bit. And you’re not really doing Tae Kwan Do unless you’re kicking people. Reading all the sex manuals in the world is not going to do anything unless you’re touching genitals. Otherwise, you’re just reading. But it’s painful. People get mad when you say that, because we derive a lot of our self-esteem and satisfaction out of these things that we choose to consume. I’m not even talking about Pepsi. I’m talking about blogs, and I’m talking about Facebook. I’m talking about MySpace and what widgets you put where. We form our identity through all these alliances we build, and for a lot of people to say to them, “Well, what are you making as a result of that?”, what they’re making is a different version of their personality every day. That’s fine as long as that’s what they want to do, but when you’re 60, are you going to be happy that that’s where your youth went?

On his essay, Better:

In the “Better” essay, which is just a short kind of rant, I had this thing where I was like, “I want to do less stuff better.” I don’t mean it as a Martin Luther kind of thing. It’s more of a philosophical approach, of saying, “If we all just tried a little bit harder and we thought just a little bit more and we became less obsessed with clicking the buttons that make information move around and thought a little bit more about how our thinking and our cognition and our behavior and our decision-making changes as a result of that information.”

I’ve asked a dozen of my friends, “How many times did you change you mind about who you were going to vote for during the election?” They all say, “Oh, I knew all along.” I was like, “Then why were you reloading Huffington Post 40 times a day?” This is really the crux of where my brain is on this stuff right now. How do you know when you have enough information to do something? I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people.

When the main way we communicate with each other is through all these things—and I’m not saying, “Don’t use Facebook, don’t use Twitter.” What I am saying is, if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.

Doing Less Stuff Better, Seeing Your Face in the Marble and Making Immigrants Cry